…and I don’t even mean that sarcastically. We have gotten to a point where the players are so powerful, it’s not a matter of how you survive the missions anymore, it’s only about how fast you can nuke the enemies. It literally feels like playing an Exterminate mission in Warframe, just speedrunning to the end of the mission while deleting everything in your path. Even on Auric Hi-Shock Troop, you just run through the level and wipe all enemies on the fly as it were nothing, independent of what they throw at you.
It used to be that I complained about overpowered weapons like Arc Rifle or Infernus staff making the game completely dull and boring, but now after the recent buffs it doesn’t even matter which classes people play, as long as they aren’t completely incompetent.
As a Vet main, I liked playing an allrounder build which required me to make so many compromises. Now I can take everything I want plus the enhanced grenade with regen and still have some leftover talent points for additional stuff. You’d think I’d be happy about being stronger and while I have to admit it was some fun for a while, especially with the new shotguns, the current state the game is just dull and lost it’s identity.
What ever happened to the Devpost where it was admitted that powercreep has gotten too far? More importantly, how should this ever be addressed without nerfing the player? Making enemies have more health will result in many weapons that rely on one-shot breakpoints to become unusable, like axes, revolvers and shotguns. Increasing the spawn rate of enemies will greatly affect performance and sound cue issues to a point where you constantly get trapped by silent disablers through walls of steel, which we already had.
Havoc is the only thing left that offers any kind of challenge now but that mode is a completely different experience that requires a whole team of good players on comms to work properly, so it shouldn’t be the only mode to offer difficulty.
i agree with this point in particular, havoc is often cited to be what you have to play if you don’t want the game to be warframe but havoc is so different from the core experience that it’s not a direct continuation to aurics for me. it’s more like a side mode that happens to be harder but balance is completely different.
i’d like an actual adventure mode (the base game, the standard tide game experience) difficulty to be non trivial in pugs and maybe even with a friend or two.
Luckily, we are not quite there yet. Last time I played Warframe (years ago, just when Fortuna came out, not sure if it changed) it was so bad that you had to go out of your way to fail a mission. When things got a bit hairy, you could hop out of your frame, rez other people and heal your frame while being invulnerable.
I found out most of the playerbase enjoyed playing the game as power fantasy instead of challenge, and so it was very unlikely the devs would do anything about it which made me quit. I hope Darktide won’t go the same way and only attract power fantasy players.
There’s nothing wrong in being overpowered in Warframe. That game is designed that way and it’s good in what it does. The problem is that Darktide was designed to be a challenging coop game relying on great combat mechanics with a focus on melee, which is currently sacrificed with every update that further makes players stronger and enemy encounters more trivial.
As a matter of fact, Warframe and Darktide are my two most played games with over 3K hours in each. I play Warframe not because it’s a challenging game but because it’s cool to be so powerful in so many different possibilities and to create overpowered builds for different missions while being able to jump 20 feet in the air.
However, Darktide isn’t designed that way and the challenging combat encounters are the heart of the game. A core game concept that diminishes with every patch.
as an interesting sort of devils advocate counterpoint, have you seen those newest statistics they released? auric spillway has a 12% completion rate.
it makes one think. my personal winrate on this is like, 20 wins 1 loss in pugs. are people actually this horrible? have we been in the wrong and the average player is just actually so abyssmally dogshitt they need 10 attempts to beat this boss once? or is there something going on with matchmaking? is it maybe that people shouldn’t be allowed to queue aurics as early? returning players? then again, i am a returning player too
it’s a weird statistic and it puts the warframe thing into perspective because i and everyone else i know who “learned” how to play darktide finds aurics warframe tier pisss easy, and by extension this new spillway mission too. but then you have the 12% winrate on that spillway. one must wonder which players the game is balanced around, is it just a matter of making aurics accessible to players who dont want to learn basic game mechanics?
For some reason, people really suck at those bossfights. The amount of people I’ve seen die to Nurgloth in VT2 when he engages them with his scythe was insane. It’s like people just forget you can block. Same as all those people that instantly die when they get focused by Rinda Karnak for a second. The rings on the floor are also a very complex game mechanic for some people.
Don’t get me wrong, the new boss fight is still pretty hard overall on auric but not to get side tracked, my original post was more about general Auric missions, not about boss fights.
you could be right, the phrasing read to me as mission board difficulty. the phrasing is “highest difficulty” which made me think base game difficulties rather than the havoc gamemode but either interpretation is reasonable i think
it does in context say the overall winrate is 48% across all difficulties so 12% on aurics isn’t completely out there
Oh yeah, for the record I’m not saying playing a game for its power fantasy is wrong in any way. It’s just not for me and I wouldn’t like Darktide going that way
On topic, I think the warframe comparison is a bit overblown because you can do some absolutely imba stuff in that game that doesn’t even come close to even the most broken stuff in DT. I do not think the average auric is anywhere as easy as the average highest level SP mission (or even EDA/ETA tbh).
That being said, yes the power creep that keeps happening is making the game less fun. Also a Vet main and every build now is just grab all the good talents that make sense for the weapons/playstyle and there’s no tradeoff. There isn’t really a new meta or build variety to the game from these particular changes. It’s just the same builds you were running before but better.
Gold toughness spillover immunity removal is not even noticeable for me and an extra 25 toughness to the ability is just a buff. Enemies were nerfed a bit as compensation after getting nerfed as compensation for reworking uncanny and reducing Ogryn spawns. It’s just an odd choice. If one is progressing in skill as they play, then as they play more hours, they will be more adept at handling the challenge the game throws at them. So why after years of the game being out are we getting more and more player power and weaker enemies? There have not been any difficulty improving changes to baseline Auric difficulty in over a year. No new modifiers or anything either.
With Warframe, there are at least a dozen other systems to engage with/reasons to be playing a mission and barrelling through a map doesn’t bother me too much because of this. In DT, I have more resources than the Emperor and nothing to do with them, which is fine but then it means I play the game to actually engage with the gameplay and not the metagame stuff and the gameplay is continuously being watered down.
Warframe is also similar to Darktide in that when Digital Extremes finally did a nerf and removed Wukong’s ability to slam attack the map at the speed of light with a macro, the review score still hasn’t fully recovered to this day.
Yes. The vast majority of players of basically any game are extremely unskilled. Combine that with the boss having mechanics that don’t exist anywhere else in Darktide plus the fight heavily favoring ranged damage and it’s no surprise that has a low clear rate.
New game mode this December: Havocer 50. Your class, talents, and weapons are randomized upon loading into the game. One possible Havocer mod is perma health degen that can cause death.
The Horde density on Auric is low, and everyone runs Special/Elite killing, so you walk through the maps.
It’s even a bit similar on Havoc 40, if you don’t have Horde modifiers, like Moebian 21st or the one where they get DR on seeing an ally die or w.e.
It also gives you an incorrect idea of what the progression to Havoc difficulty will be, and causes people to play low Cleave builds on Havoc, then struggle the entire match, with high density.
Also the builds doing insane damage on Havoc do that same damage on Auric.
If player power is so high that you don’t have to learn the basics, you wont learn the basics unless you intentionally seek it out.
This is the current state of the game, and I’d say has been for at least 2 years.
The difference bringing [insert insane aoe output build here] makes in auric is just unfathomable, genuinely gamebreaking when thinking of the games design intent.
If one out of four players is able to keep enemies irrelevant for the duration of a map, there is no reason to learn how to engage with enemies, especially not for the 3 others.
Give these players a situation where they suddenly have to engage with enemies AND new mechanics? they flop instantly.